America Exists
Mumia Abu Jamal | 11.01.2002 22:39
Published in
DEATH BLOSSOMS - Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience
by Mumia Abu Jamal (1996)
Plough Publishing House
ISBN 0-87486-086-5
DEATH BLOSSOMS - Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience
by Mumia Abu Jamal (1996)
Plough Publishing House
ISBN 0-87486-086-5
AMERICA EXISTS
America exists in a virtual sea of materialism. Here, one sees material excess in the midst of utter poverty. Here, in the cradle of global capital power, one finds more food, more clothing, more creature comforts, more material wealth than almost anywhere on this planet.
Ironically, the lives of many surrounded by opulence are awash in unhappiness. This nation eats most of the world's food. It consumes most of the world's energy. It treats the vast lands and seas of the earth as if it were a toilet bowl. It gains its material wealth from the theft of other people's lands and the exploitation of other people's labor.
Its principle is not - and never has been - something as amorphous as "Christianity", it is naked materialism. This materialism drives not only the elite, but average, so-called everyday folk. It forms a perspective that permeates our entire society.
Even in the realm of sexuality we are, to paraphrase the singer Madonna, material girls and boys. We define ourselves by projections, the most variant quality in human personality.
If a man is born a male, but utilizes the latest biomedical technology to transform himself into a woman, is he a woman? Or is he rather a sexual materialist who has merely purchased a new sexual persona? Are we what we look like on the outside, or are we our biological functions?
As we are with our bodies, so we are with our environment. Consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, by express intent and by oblique accident, we transform the natural world toward ends we neither know or care to know.
We rape our Mother, Earth, for new toys to play with, in order to maximise profits for men already richer than Croesus. How much is enough?
If material things are not our salvation, why do we spend our energies in endless acquisition? If wealth makes us more cruel, more calloused, and colder, what is its good?
To be sure, we live in a material universe. We must eat, and we must drink of this earth's substance. Yet after we squander its resources and make it uninhabitable, will we be able, even with our material wealth, to restore the air, to reanimate our earth, to repair the genetic damage we have done?
We are greedy eating the very heart of our tomorrow and our children's tomorrows. And meantime our god - the dark force of international corporate power - decides, hour by hour, how destructive the day's economic engine will be; how much long-term gain will be destroyed in the race for short-term profit.
............................................................
www.mumia.org
America exists in a virtual sea of materialism. Here, one sees material excess in the midst of utter poverty. Here, in the cradle of global capital power, one finds more food, more clothing, more creature comforts, more material wealth than almost anywhere on this planet.
Ironically, the lives of many surrounded by opulence are awash in unhappiness. This nation eats most of the world's food. It consumes most of the world's energy. It treats the vast lands and seas of the earth as if it were a toilet bowl. It gains its material wealth from the theft of other people's lands and the exploitation of other people's labor.
Its principle is not - and never has been - something as amorphous as "Christianity", it is naked materialism. This materialism drives not only the elite, but average, so-called everyday folk. It forms a perspective that permeates our entire society.
Even in the realm of sexuality we are, to paraphrase the singer Madonna, material girls and boys. We define ourselves by projections, the most variant quality in human personality.
If a man is born a male, but utilizes the latest biomedical technology to transform himself into a woman, is he a woman? Or is he rather a sexual materialist who has merely purchased a new sexual persona? Are we what we look like on the outside, or are we our biological functions?
As we are with our bodies, so we are with our environment. Consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, by express intent and by oblique accident, we transform the natural world toward ends we neither know or care to know.
We rape our Mother, Earth, for new toys to play with, in order to maximise profits for men already richer than Croesus. How much is enough?
If material things are not our salvation, why do we spend our energies in endless acquisition? If wealth makes us more cruel, more calloused, and colder, what is its good?
To be sure, we live in a material universe. We must eat, and we must drink of this earth's substance. Yet after we squander its resources and make it uninhabitable, will we be able, even with our material wealth, to restore the air, to reanimate our earth, to repair the genetic damage we have done?
We are greedy eating the very heart of our tomorrow and our children's tomorrows. And meantime our god - the dark force of international corporate power - decides, hour by hour, how destructive the day's economic engine will be; how much long-term gain will be destroyed in the race for short-term profit.
............................................................
www.mumia.org
Mumia Abu Jamal
